The Big UGG Boots

The April 2015 east coast low was severe. It killed people in the Hunter, flooded Dungog, cut power to hundreds of thousands of homes and did enormous damage. A brand-new roadside sculpture surviving its first full day intact is a genuinely good engineering anecdote, and it is rare for a Big Thing to have a documented stress test.

The boots are roughly thirteen times a women's size eight, which is a more useful scale statement than a height in metres because it tells you what is being multiplied.

Mortels has been making sheepskin products since 1958 and manufactures at Thornton, at 1 Weakleys Drive, in purpose-built Australiana shearing-shed-style premises where guided tours run through a working factory. That is the distinguishing feature – this is not a retail outlet with a mascot outside, it is an operating manufacturing plant that lets the public walk through it.

Sheepskin footwear is one of the few genuinely Australian-originated products with global reach, and also the subject of a long trademark fight over whether the word itself is generic. The boots sit outside a factory that was making them before that argument started.